atomicdevils
No bio...
User ID: 1770
atomicdevils
1yr ago
The problem is that "prostitution" is as worthless of a word as "homeless" because they can be used to describe a vast spectrum of behaviors and situations. A single mom who gets fired in an economic downturn and thus can't pay rent and is evicted is not the same as a 25 year old man with a fent habit who lives in a tent for easy access to his dealer and things to boost to pay for his habit - and yet both would be "homeless"
Similarly, the vast majority of women who sell sex in the US are not like Aella they are like the street walkers you'll find in the shitty parts of any city. These women tend to be addicts, tend to have a fraught relationship with "consent" (is it really consent if their pimps beat them for not making enough money?) and live sad lives of poverty. One could argue that full legalization would solve this issue and balance the scales more towards Aella-types...but many studies have shown legalization increases human trafficking (a supply and demand problem that will exist forever - very few women wish to be prostitutes compared to the number of men who wish to use prostitute's services).
So, even basic questions of policy in this debate are difficult and highly depend on what one values more in society. Prostitution and porn are "questions" that cannot be answered with data because data cannot tell us what we ought to value more than something else. That's going to depend on the individual's moral palette. Let's assume that the data show that violent porn does not lead to violent tendencies in men who view it regularly - that wouldn't convince someone who believes violent depictions of women are inherently wrong. If it was shown that watching child pornography does not lead to pedophilic abuse in men who view it regularly many people would still feel that child pornography was wrong - even if it was drawn/rendered and not real. Even if it was shown that viewing realistic rendered child porn decreased pedophile offending rates (this is unlikely, some studies show that consumption of this kind of pornography makes offending more likely - but we just don't know), many people would still consider the production of such images wrong, perhaps even criminal.
atomicdevils
4mo ago
I think you've got this very wrong. US foreign policy towards Israel won't change at all. Not one bit. Anti-Israel sentiment periodically rises, the pro-Hamas/pr-Palestinian protest cycle is very old indeed - decades and decades old. Did the previous protest cycles change US foreign policy towards Israel? No.
atomicdevils
9mo ago
It was a very deadly pandemic for very old people. It is sad they died, and especially that many died alone due to horrible/cruel hospital policies. But this was not a particularly deadly pandemic for younger adults.
Look at this age stratification https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254488/us-share-of-total-covid-deaths-by-age-group/
atomicdevils
4mo ago
I think the frequency of autism diagnoses in tech couples has more to do with income than tech - as in, highly motivated wealthy parents watching for every single child learning milestone are much more likely and able to take their kid to a shrink if/when they perceive a lag in achievement. Since shrinks are motivated to find something wrong, most of them will find something wrong, and since autism covers a spectrum from "throws feces at the wall all day and is nonverbal" to "sometimes feels slightly awkward with new people" it's a nice safe diagnosis to feed the type A parents. Same with ADD.
I think a lot of normal variation in personality has been pathologized.
atomicdevils
9mo ago
I actually wish that I had done a bit more to try to prevent spread of the disease.
The only thing your increased caution may have accomplished is slightly delaying the date you became infected with covid. You couldn't have prevented covid from spreading.
There was never any chance that this thing would be controlled with quarantines or even far more effective vaccines if we had them - since covid infects non-human animals and now has undoubtably many natural reservoirs, we could never eradicate it like we did with smallpox (only infects humans). It's also insanely contagious - we'd all have needed new, fit-tested n95s for every time we went out and goggles to boot (your eyes are connected to your nose and throat - aerosols that land on them/in them can travel downwards and voila, covid infection).
For adults 18-45 covid was more like a bad influenza strain, if you look at deaths by age group it becomes very apparent that it was really a disease of the old with some obese younger adults thrown in. Look at this age stratification https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254488/us-share-of-total-covid-deaths-by-age-group/
2% (85+) of the US population made up 27% of the deaths!
atomicdevils
8mo ago
I disagree. Lots of people are poor, very few are meth/fent addicts. Normal people don't end up living in a tent on the sidewalk and doing fent if they lose their job or have difficulty with housing - they rely on their friends/relatives or services available. Methfent addicts do not do this, because they've systematically burnt every bridge they've ever had through stealing and abuse and none of their former friends or relatives will lift a finger to help them anymore - in other words, the addiction came before the financial troubles and exacerbated them.
atomicdevils
6mo ago
The arabs could have taken a two state solution in the original partition - they decided to attack the new nation of Israel instead. They could have had two states in 2000 with Clinton helping - nope, turned that down. They could have elected someone to help them build Gaza into something great, nope elected literal Nazi sympathizers who want to do a genocide. I mean, at some point, what can you do?
atomicdevils
6mo ago
Doubtful, it does look like her mom has some false hope tho.
It'd take a lot to keep someone with that many massive fractures in their legs from bleeding out internally - and in some of the video of her she has what looks like a gunshot wound to the head.
atomicdevils
6mo ago
The Arabs could have had another Arab state, but they declined the UN partition agreement and attacked Israel as soon as she was born - Israel won that war and expanded her territory. If Ukraine ousts Russia and takes a bit of Russian territory to boot would we blame them? The palestinians rejected a Clinton deal for a two state solution in 2000...they elected Hamas as soon as Israel withdrew from Gaza...I think the horrors of war are what we see from Israel, but the Palestinians commit actual terrorism.
atomicdevils
1yr ago
Teen girls are particularly vulnerable to social contagion - it's how anorexia, bulimia, cutting etc have come in waves among teenage girls.
Adults are vulnerable too (in the '80s or '60s perhaps you would have interpreted whatever mental states lead you to feel trans as an indication of some mental disorder that was popular at the time - in the late '80s and early '90s maybe you would have thought your feelings had to do with repressed memories of abuse), but not nearly as much.
atomicdevils
1yr ago
Linguistically dividing a politically useful/necessary class into constituent parts ("menstruator" "pregnant people" "people with vaginas") could be argued to reduce class cohesion - essentially, if "women" don't exist then it's harder for "women" to band together and advocate for their rights.
Medically there are language barrier issues as well, if you use "cervix-havers need pap smears" instead of "women need pap smears" you will necessarily fail to address a number of the female individuals you seek to alert.
The last argument I have against such language, beyond its awkwardness and ugliness in prose, is that changing the words will not affect reality in the long term. So, while such language is disjointed, ugly, atomizing etc now...over time "menstruator" and "afab" will just replace "women" in people's minds and will be as inclusive/exclusive as those words are now. Humans are very good at recognizing another individual's sex, very few trans people pass and those that do are mostly trans men...no one will be fooled by linguistic games in the long run, just like if we started calling cats "undogs" it'd be weird and people would misunderstand it for a while but in the end it wouldn't change anything material.
atomicdevils
1yr ago
Vaccines have to be more good than bad. Almost all of them are. The covid vaccines get a wee bit murky in that regard when you get to younger age cohorts - especially younger male cohorts. There's a lot of good evidence that for young males in particular the virus carries fewer side effects than the mRNA vaccines, especially the 2nd dose of said vaccines. For older age groups I think you'd have to show pretty awful side effects for vaccination not to be worth it - so, for instance with over 65s you'd have to really have some bad frequency of side effects since they're so vulnerable to covid.
The other issue at hand here is efficacy, however. If the bivalent booster has risks but doesn't ultimately protect anyone any better than the 2x shots they already had (or 3x with the original booster) then there's really no good argument for them. The FDA lost two of its most experienced vaccine regulators over the Biden admin's "boosters for all" push, which wasn't based on any data whatsoever - we don't have any data showing that a 30 year old vaccinated woman will have further reduced mortality and morbidity with a booster shot or a bivalent booster. Most other countries, where their medical systems are more tuned towards cost and efficacy, have only authorized boosters for elderly people and those with severe immunocompromise (cancer patients). The US chose to push a one-size-fits-all policy with boosters, with zero evidence, and so...when a safety signal like this bubbles up it looks even worse than it would have if they'd pursued more evidence based recommendations.
atomicdevils
4mo ago
Sure, I just don't see it in this case. Support for Palestinian terrorism has been a perennial hobby among young leftists - this most recent outpouring of support is nothing new. In the '60s and '70s many leftist groups had much stronger ties to Palestinian terrorism - Baader Meinhof gang even went down to train with them. In the end it all fizzled out, and I see no reason a lesser wave that doesn't involve the material commitment seen in prior decades won't also fizzle out.
Israel is an incredibly important ally of the US, they could glass Gaza and we'd still support them - perhaps with a wrap on the knuckles, but no more than that.
atomicdevils
1yr ago
If men were not as vulnerable to memes as women, the US military would not spend any money on advertising to teenage males.
atomicdevils
5mo ago
From my perspective, the main difference with Islam vs. Christianity is that Islam was started by a warlord and the tales of his good deeds include beheading all the men of a Jewish tribe that had surrendered. I think this is going to result in a religion that is much different from one started by (either in reality or simply in story) a former carpenter who preached peace and turning the other cheek.
atomicdevils
1yr ago
A very general overview of adolescent cognition
puberty blockers cause IQ drop https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00044/full#B6
and "According to the results obtained through the cognitive evaluations, the patient presented a decrease in their overall intellectual performance after the onset of pubertal block, pointing to immaturity in her cognitive development (Table (Table11)."
atomicdevils
1yr ago
Since we know that puberty is required to mature the brain to its adult capability, and since we know that cognitive abilities that deal with understanding long term consequences only develop with puberty, and since we know that puberty blockers permanently retard brain development - how can we argue for their use? How can a minor without the capability to understand long term consequences consent to a procedure that will permanently retard their ability to understand long term consequences?
atomicdevils
1yr ago
For young males, the risk of myocarditis after the 2nd dose of mRNA vaccine is higher than with covid infection. This should be taken into account in all vaccine recommendations, unfortunately in the USA we've chosen a "one size fits all" approach that groups 80 year old women with 19 year old men.
atomicdevils
4mo ago
I could be convinced if you could show me 40 years of polling results on Israel WRT youth sentiment, it'd be better by far if you could dive into how those numbers changed during times of conflict.
The US has never been Israel's ally because of oil, Israel is important because it's part of our containment strategy towards Iran (among other things).
atomicdevils
4mo ago
This would be like if Christians in Israel started demanding if a minor random Christian holiday near Passover be given equal standing to their most important holiday.
So? How Christians have celebrated Christmas has changed dramatically over the last 2k years, and easter and christmas have sort traded places as most important holidays. It's entirely possible that easter will again become the bigger holiday than christmas
atomicdevils
7mo ago
It is incredibly rare to be at the center of so many successful companies (paypal, tesla, space x, starlink...). Regardless of his other traits, he's most certainly good at picking winners.
atomicdevils
9mo ago
instead of blaming it on social contagion and the media, perhaps you should first see if they have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, polycystic ovarian syndrome, or abnormal testosterone levels; there’s a high chance that’s the case.
What's the likelihood that these conditions arise in a friend-group of middle school girls all at once?
Social contagion among adolescent females is a huge, huge thing. The Salem Witch Trials? Social contagion among adolescent females.
atomicdevils
1yr ago
I work on campus, I just ignore it. Even when people introduce themselves with pronouns and ask mine I give my name and don't answer the pronoun question. I leave them wondering if I didn't hear them or if I'm purposefully ignoring the question, and I don't care.
atomicdevils
1yr ago
Physical activity did collapse, though. Combine high caloric intake with very low physical activity and voila, everyone is fat.
The allies did terrible things in WWII, firebombing Dresden and killing many, many civilians. Does that mean that the Axis and the Allies were morally equivalent sides?
Hamas hides their bases inside hospitals and schools and apartment buildings. Israel cannot just let Hamas continue to fire rockets at them - so they retaliate, but because Hamas hides in civilian areas those civilians become casualties of war. This is very different from IDF soldiers going into Gaza, raping and killing Palestinian women and then parading their bodies around to cheers of "god is great" from fellow Israelis - which is what Hamas has video'd itself doing. Hamas is an islamist organization that wants to help build a global caliphate and genocide all Jews everywhere. It's easy to "pick a side"
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